


scarier than an afrit

by clickingkeyboards



Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: 1930s Murder Lesbians, Amina being a badass, Danger, Dates, F/F, F/M, Flirting, Hurt/Comfort, MMU Halloween Exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:15:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27294796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: Daisy and Amina are determined to have a date and catch up with each other, but a looming figure from Daisy and Hazel’s last case is determined to put a stop their plans — permanently.
Relationships: Amina El Maghrabi/Daisy Wells, Daisy Wells & Hazel Wong
Comments: 5
Kudos: 17
Collections: Murder Most Unladylike Events





	scarier than an afrit

“You’re  _ nervous _ .”

I turned around and scowled at Hazel, but she didn’t back down. She was smiling at me knowingly, a half-finished casebook open on her lap.

“I am not! I’m simply…” I dropped down my hands from where I was fixing my hat and shook them by my sides. “I want to look my best.”

“You look perfectly fine, Daisy,” Hazel said, setting her casebook to the side on the bed and getting to her feet. “Amina is going to be knocked off her feet,” she said, smiling. “Honest.”

I was wearing my best old rose dress and a light blue hat adorned with matching flowers, not too dramatic and perfectly fitting for a young woman on a day out in London with her close friend, showing a foreigner the sights. “Thank you, Watson.” I turned a circle before sitting down on the edge of my bed. “It is nerve wracking, isn’t it? All this romance business.”

“Horribly so.” She bumped her head against my shoulder. “We’re doing alright, I think.”

Thankfully, my last tumultuous mission (with Hazel by my side) had ended just before the start of the final Deepdean term. The Easter holidays were frightfully exciting for both of us, two and a half weeks of rushing about London uncovering a German spy and several, much more bitter things that we were both eager to forget. We were back at Uncle Felix’s flat, Hazel fretting over Alexander taking her to the pictures while I was perfectly made-up and not frightened at all as I waited for Amina to knock on the door.

* * *

Amina was wearing a deep green dress and a matching hat and I quite forgot myself for a moment, staring at her as she stood in the entryway.

Tutting at me as he walked past into the living room, Uncle Felix whispered, “Greet your  _ friend _ , Daisy.”

I resisted the urge to swear at him because I am always perfect around Amina. With a smile on her face, she came forward and took my hands in hers. “Daisy!” she breathed out, and I leant down to kiss her. “You look so lovely.”

“So do you,” I replied, utterly determined to not make a right fool of myself. “Your hat is beautiful.”

I have never considered myself a great admirer of clothes, but they always look particularly excellent when Amina wears them. “Hazel is in our room, if you want to say hello to her?”

“Oh, can I?” Amina brightened and looked down the corridor, and I took her by her wrist. Letting go of her hand made me feel cold all over, and the misty fog of  _ Amina _ in my head cleared when I did so.

Hazel accepted Amina’s eager hug and promised to drop by with me the next day, and then she turned to me and beamed. “Good luck,” she said once her arms were about me in a very tight hug.

“You too. Alexander is good for you and he loves you, so it will be perfectly alright.”

* * *

Amina had much to tell me about her life, how her sister was to be married in the summer and how Miss Beauvais was pretending to not be pleased by her extended absence, and how she would like to take me somewhere very precious tomorrow: the Shah Jahan Mosque, just a little south of London.

“It is quite beautiful, I’m sure you’ll adore it!” she said to me, looping her hand through my arm. It is not a terribly comfortable position when I am not the one doing it, but Amina was sparkling up at me and so I bore it. “I’m planning to take my midday prayer there. You’ll have to wear a long skirt and cover your head, of course.”

“I don’t mind. I have plenty from Egypt,” I replied, thinking about the mosques that we visited while in Cairo. Hazel was terribly taken with the architecture of them all, while Amina pointed out to us the view from the women’s galleries. I have always found churches rather a bore, so quiet and all really rather identical, chilly with uncomfortable seats and mixed-up and odd teachings that do not at all match what the book says (privately, I think that George Mukherjee may be right about Christianity being taught in a contrary way), but Amina’s mosques were always a fun and interesting adventure. “Though I did lose one of the scarves to the Nile.”

I noticed that, in the few moments consumed by my thoughts, Amina had gone rather misty-eyed. “Please don’t, Daisy. I can’t bear the thought.”

Although I thought that everybody was really too upset about my almost-death, as if I was not the one nearly drowned and stranded alone in a foreign country, I decided that it was not worth upsetting Amina to argue my point. Hazel, in her Hazel-ish way, calls it ‘character development’. “All right, I won’t. The park is just down this road.”

She smiled at me and said, “Thank you. Now, I have a simply marvellous idea for a prank at my sister’s wedding!”

As she went on about  _ afrits  _ and hibiscus juice and how she could use a rather clever method that she and Kitty worked out at Deepdean to turn off the lights without being anywhere near them, I tried to pay close attention. However, I was distracted by somebody walking past us, almost making me misstep. I didn’t, of course, because I am simply perfect when it comes to acting like a put-together lady.

The man was wearing an enormous camel wool coat, rather like the trim and decent coat that Alexander had been sporting the last time that Hazel and I saw him, on an Exeat weekend. He had a wide-brimmed hat and gloves, and what Aunt Lucy often refers to as a ‘dictator moustache’. Although it was utterly unfounded, he struck me as an unpleasant caricature of Lord Edward Ainsworth, a bitter man from the case Hazel and I had just cleared up in triumph. Since Egypt, I have been followed by remnants of previous cases rather more than I used to, though Fallingford has always left a nasty taste in my mouth. Therefore, it was not surprising to me that I was frightened into remembering the man who had me shooting a pistol for the first time, even though he was only an ordinary man dressed as anybody would be to ward off the Easter chill.

“Daisy, are you alright?” Amina asked me.

I nodded my head. “Perfectly. That man gave us a rather strange look, is all.” Lying to Amina put a bad taste in my mouth, but I did not want her to worry as much as Uncle Felix did when he found out what Hazel and I had come up against.

“Probably admiring my wonderfulness,” she replied, tossing her shimmering dark hair over her shoulder.

“Then I shall simply have to admire it so much that nobody else gets a chance.” I fixed her with my most passionate look and she understood the meaning as she always does, and squeezed my arm.

“You are the truly wonderful one, Daisy.”

I felt like I would burst with excitement, and had to bite my tongue and sternly tell myself to calm down.

* * *

We were walking beside each other in the park when a voice inside my head — which sounded peculiarly like Hazel and always has — told me to look behind me. “But be subtle about it!” I could imagine her saying. “You don’t want to end up needing to shoot a pistol that you don’t have.”

“Amina,” I asked, keeping my voice perfectly level, “can I use your compact? I can feel that my hair has stuck to my lipstick but I left mine at home.”

“You look absolutely fine, Daisy, but here.” She passed me her compact with a peculiar look, doubtless a gift from her mother judging by the word  _ habibti _ enraged on the lid. I pressed the catch to open it and, while pretending to pull my hair away from my lips, angled the mirror so that I could see over my shoulder.

There was Lord Edward Ainsworth, wearing a swarthy camel wool coat, his head tipped down with a wide-brimmed hat, and only swinging one arm. I could picture the bullet wound in his shoulder, and I caught a glimpse of the scratches across his face from Hazel’s nails. “Oh… shit.”

With wide eyes, she squeezed my arm urgently. “Are you alright, Daisy?”

“Perfectly. Would you like to go… sit in a cafe, perhaps?” I suggested, glancing across at a cafe that Hazel and I often get tea in when we want to talk about Alexander without Uncle Felix and Aunt Lucy overhearing. “I’ll pay for whatever you like.”

“Such a gentleman, Daisy Wells,” Amina teased, and we rushed out of the park pressed a little closer than friends ought to be.

* * *

“What is it?” she asked me when we sat down and ordered. “You’re nervous. Don’t think that I don’t notice you, Daisy Wells.”

Even though she said it so fiercely, fixing me with an imploring look, it made me feel a warmth that clamped my entire head in a surprisingly pleasant vice. “I… there was a man behind us in the park, Lord Edward Ainsworth. He’s from our last case.” Seeing her alarmed look as she remembered what I put in my letter, I hurried to add, “Not the spy that we ousted, he will never breathe fresh air again, which is what you get when you spy for Herr Hitler.”

Trying to gently pull me back towards the point that I was going to get to if she gave me a couple more seconds, she asked, “How dangerous is this man?”

“Well, he was running a prolific trafficking ring and—”

Her eyes were enormous and concerned, her words poking me harshly. “And you didn’t mention this before  _ because _ ?”

“Because I didn’t think it would be an issue!” I wave my hands emphatically, trying to communicate that I had been worried for days until Uncle Felix told us sternly that Ainsworth would never see sunlight again. “Uncle Felix’s department said that they’d have apprehended him within a week!”

“When have you ever listened to what they say?”

I shook my head. “My uncle’s department is a disaster and they’re gratuitously overrun. He complains that even his right-hand man is more invested in the gossip mill at their work than saving the country. But my uncle cares about Hazel, and me. He would do anything to make sure that we weren't in harm’s way more than necessary, and so this is a failing that has happened out of his hands. I know it.”

“Is Ainsworth truly that terrible?” Amina asked, reaching across the table to take my hand. She squeezed it and my chest felt rather overwhelmingly strange, as if she had reached inside me and held out a hand to still my racing heart.

“You have no idea.”

* * *

_ “DAISY!” _

_ There is nothing that terrifies me more on missions than my own name from Hazel’s mouth. It signifies that she doesn’t care about blowing my cover, about the mission, about my uncle’s reputation. My name means that Hazel Wong’s life is in danger. _

_ “HAZEL!” I screamed back, rushing down the back stairs and out the back door of the hotel, shedding my handbag on the way down. As I did so, I reached inside and pulled out a weapon that I was issued in January and had never had a use for until that moment: a golden snub-nosed revolver. “WATSON!” _

_ I burst out into the rainy evening to see Hazel’s heels struggling for purchase against the cobbles as Ainsworth clasped her high up to his broad chest, dragging her away from the hotel and towards the alleyway that the body of Mantei was found at the mouth of. Her hands were up by his face and her nails viciously tore at the skin of his cheeks. Around her neck was a strip of white fabric, a gag that had obviously slipped down from her mouth when she manipulated her jaw in the way that we were taught. It fitted perfectly with my deductions as to why she had sounded so strangled when she shouted my name. _

_ After a horrifying several seconds occupied by me struggling with the safety on my rain-slick gun, she found purchase to grip his face in both hands and jam her thumbs into his eye sockets. _

_ He bellowed and let her go, and she fell down gasping on the cobbles, making no effort to move away. “Hazel!” I called, my voice sounding impossibly quiet and mist bore down upon us. “Watson, move!” _

_ She didn’t, gasping and choking and hugging herself as the rain on the ground mixed with mud and stained her dress. Seizing the opportunity, Ainsworth grabbed her wrist and made to wrench her up again, tugging her towards him as he half-dragged her down the alleyway. Steadying my pistol with my left hand, I adjusted my aim as far away from Hazel as possible and squeezed the trigger. _

_ It really was as simple as that. One twitch of my finger and I had shot somebody for the first time in my life. _

_ It struck Ainsworth in the left shoulder and he went down swearing viciously, and I was running before he had hit the ground. The muzzle of the gun burnt me when I tried to grip it in my hand, so I simply discarded it on the ground with such a violent motion that it went off again, shooting the wall with an enormous noise. I dropped to my knees beside Hazel, gathering her in my arms and forcing her to her feet. We held each other in that alleyway for what felt like hours, as Ainsworth groaned and gasped and Hazel shook with tears against me, until Aunt Lucy and her personnel came running. _

* * *

“What will he do if he finds you?” Amina asked, stroking her thumb across my knuckles.

“Whatever is between slap me and kill me on the scale of ‘aggressive reactions to have to a person’s presence’,” I said, holding up one hand and marking two points in the air.

Giggling, she sparkled at me and replied, “That’s a wide margin of error, Daisy. I think that scaring somebody with a blood-splattered sheet is in that gap, actually.”

“As is setting off a firework in an observatory,” I replied, thinking of the first case that Amina helped us with. 

“And poisoning somebody’s drink, perhaps.” She sticks out her tongue when she properly laughs, and I noticed it in that moment. I wanted to kiss her.

Wondering aloud, I asked, “Would the alarm clocks be worse than a slap?”

“The lecture that I got was worse than a beating, trust me,” she said, eyes glittering in a way that I didn’t think possible. It made her so incredibly pretty, even more so than she was already. “Come on. We oughtn’t let that man ruin our date.”

“He could hurt us, Amina!” I said, though I was already picking up the half-finished bottle of Cola to take back to the park and polish off on our walk. 

Putting down her money on the table and raising her hand to ask for the cheque for our Coca-Cola and cakes, she said, “You’ll protect me. And I can fight too, Daisy Wells.”

I imagined Amina tackling somebody in the way that Aunt Lucy taught Hazel and I to tackle Uncle Felix in practise, and I had to swallow a lump in my throat. 

* * *

We walked along the secluded trails of the park hand-in-hand, debating the most excellent way to deter a creepy gentleman. Just as I was detailing how Hazel’s method of pretending not to speak English was much better than my violent swearing in terms of practicality and effectiveness, while Amina advocated for her method of pretending to be hysterical, I noticed a wide-brimmed hat pass just above the line of bushes separating us from another winding path. 

I nudged Amina to walk with me, around the thick and unkempt bushes and behind a gnarled oak tree, emerging where we had been before with Ainsworth well past us. “We’d better go,” Amina said, glancing this way and that. “Even this is a bit too  _ real _ for me, after Egypt.”

Begrudgingly agreeing, because I quite fancied the idea of a dramatic chase scene, I let Amina loop her hand through my arm and lead me out to the exit of the park. “I’m just going to nip to the ladies,” she said as we walked up to the rose-thatched archway. “I won’t be a minute.”

I was tapping my fingers against my cheek and humming as I counted the seconds when somebody seized me by my forearm and dragged me back into the undergrowth. Despite my swearing and spitting, the attacker did not let go.

From the press of his fingers, I knew it was Ainsworth. I remembered how he had put his hands on my hips when moving past me, how he had tucked Hazel’s hair behind her ear, how it had felt when he grabbed my ankle while bleeding in that blasted alleyway. I knew the feel of those fingers like the back of my hand, and they were going to hurt me there and then. However, they would not be the death of me if I could help it. 

I emerged quite covered in twigs in a secluded little spot shrouded by bushes and trees on all four sides, and I realised with a horrible up-and-down jolt that I had abandoned my bag when I was grabbed. An awful feeling gripped me, the feeling that overcame me in the moment that I was suspended in the air before falling from the SS Hatshepsut, only prolonged beyond what I could bear. The danger before me felt so far away, and yet was so much closer than the spinning motors of the boat and the wide, unforgiving depths of the Nile. 

“Please don’t hurt me,” I whispered to Ainsworth as he leered before me, his hand gripping my forearm with a knife poised at my throat. Suddenly, I understood exactly why Hazel acts the way she does when faced with such spontaneous situations: she constantly feels unprepared and anxious, just as I did in that moment. 

“HEY!” came a voice from behind me, accompanied by the bottle of Cola that Amina and I had taken from the cafe spiralling past me and shattering against a tree. “Pick on somebody your own size!”

Ainsworth dropped the knife in shock and I thought that it made him even worse than he already was: I, Daisy Wells, never lose control of myself. I seized the chance, snatching up the knife along with a fair few leaves and lunging at him, pinning him against the tree with all my weight against his chest, the knife poised as a warning.

“Amina,” I said, not caring how dreadfully unladylike I sounded as I gasped, “can you take the belt of your dress and give it here?”

With an eager nod, she undid her belt and handed it to me, and I slipped the knife into the decorations on my hat as if it were a pin, using my free hands to tie off the belt around Ainsworth’s wrists in a clumsy but reliable knot.

“You are going to rot in jail,” Amina spat at him, leaning up to his furious ruddy face. “And I am going to enjoy the thought.”

* * *

Laughing, Alexander said, “And to think that all we got was a Vivien Leigh film!”

George blatantly transferred his roast beef sandwiches onto Alexander’s plate, and stole some cucumber ones in return. “And I got a book on Lenin’s Russia and a phone call from Felix Mountfitchet saying that I might like to know that his niece had just performed a citizen’s arrest on a lord.”

Despite Uncle Felix’s worries over Ainsworth, Hazel and I had been permitted to leave the flat to go and get afternoon tea with the others the day after the whole tiresome business was tied up, and Amina and I were gladly filling them in on what exactly had happened. 

Beside me, Hazel laughed and sparkled at Alexander. Her hand was gripping mine and she squeezed it when she said, “Daisy is more cut out for the random adventures. I need a good while of expecting something to happen before an enormous chase scene.”

“Which you usually get!” I protested in answer to her pointed look in my direction. “And only once or twice was the chasing my fault!”

She started to count on her fingers, and I shoved her as harshly as I dared to. “You’re a horror, Hazel.”

“She’s lovely,” Alexander disagreed softly.

“I don’t like you,” was my retort, in such a matter-of-fact tone that even Hazel caved and laughed at my teasing.

“I think,” Amina said, slipping her hand into my own, “that it was a  _ perfect  _ date.”

I felt my voice leave my body all at once when she locked eyes with me, the most Hazel-ish feeling in the world. As Amina looked at me and I could only stare back, I thought that I was quite happy being Hazel-ish if it made me feel like that every time that Amina did something.

Every time Amina did something like  _ smile _ .


End file.
